Optimize Yourself

Many people put their resume online, leave it alone, and hope for the best. They have only slightly greater chance of getting any feedback than if they had shot it out into space but a much greater chance than someone who doesn’t have a resume online at all.

Even if you’re not the most tech savvy person on the planet, launching your resume into cyberspace can offer a great return on your investment if you optimize the opportunity. For about $10 a year you can purchase a domain name from somewhere like domainspricedright.com or fatcow.com.

They usually offer a free hosting option but it means a banner ad for their site will be placed across the top of your site.  If you’re in the tech or design field you might want to consider paying for hosting and adding a portfolio along with your resume but it’s not necessary. Navigate to the site’s free web editor where you can recreate your resume there. If you already have a web version available you can upload it through an FTP or file manager provided by the hosting site.

Once your resume is live online you can link to the URL on other networking sites or email it to potential employers.  Besides saving paper and excuses, hiring managers are often impressed by this sort of initiative. Brand your other job search materials like business cards with the URL for offline networking as well.

Make even more use of your efforts by adding analytics to your online resume. Google offers a free tool in their webmaster kit that allows you to add a snippet of code to your online resume that tracks traffic to and from your URL and allows you to run reports.  With this in place you can see how many people have viewed your resume each day, week or month. Duration and location can be generated to let you know who’s most interested in you and original verses new visits will tell you who keeps coming back to sneak a peek.

Looking at entrance sources lets you know the route someone took through the web to find you. Whether someone clicked your resume through LinkedIn or an email you’ll know where they came from and deduce who you might want to follow up with in the near future.

Increase your chance of employers finding your resume on accident by adding key words and linking previous positions you’ve had to job descriptions on the web. Search engine spiders will pluck those out and put you above other applicants who just have a PDF or Word Doc floating in cyber space untethered.

Google offers lots of free products to help increase your online presence and in turn your employment possibilities. If it seems like it might be above your head take the time to search the help section or watch some tutorials. The time you spend will pay off in the end and you will be able to add another skill to your resume.